Performance benchmarks for integrating electronic education in medical schools

Marketing

In order to incorporate the electronic education business into Med Ed, Learner is going to need to set out some performance benchmarks for the unit that reflect the bricks-and-mortar Med Ed educational leadership. There are a few different issues, therefore, that need to be covered. The first is the setting of performance benchmarks, which should reflect both the competencies of Cyber Health and the mission of Med Ed. The second issue that needs to be addressed is how these different performance benchmarks contribute to the organization's overall objectives.

Web Site Design

There are several different benchmarks for web site design. Kim, Shaw and Schneider (2003) have proposed six categories of benchmarks for e-commerce: business function, corporation credibility, contents reliability, website attractiveness, systematic structure and navigation. These cover most of the critical areas, but because with electronic education the students actively interface with the school over the web, there will also need to be another set of benchmarks that reflects that.

Business function is an area that the current leadership group at Cyber Health is concerned with. They have a system that emphasizes click to order functionality, and feels that this ease of registration and payment is an advantage. We agree that this functionality should be smooth and secure, but it is not a source of competitive advantage; the quality of the education and the value of the diploma are the competitive advantages. Benchmarks for business function are number of pages to register, security of payment and speed of transaction. The number of shoppers converted to customers is another metric here.

Corporation credibility is reflected in the quality of the degree, and is affected by the professionalism of not only the website but the service offering overall. Cyber Health's reputation is not as good as Med Ed's reputation, so rebranding might be necessary. There are reputational surveys that can work as benchmarks, in addition to demand. Content reliability is something that can be benchmarked with the frequency of error feedback, and the frequency of the content checks. Website attractiveness can be gauged using user feedback surveys.

Structure and navigation are reflected in benchmarks that measure the tightness of the code, the speed of the processing of pages, and the number of clicks to perform key transactions. On the educational side, timeouts and streamlining data flow are key objectives, especially with a system based on interactive technology.

Features

Med Ed has the objective of being a leader in its field, and to accomplish this it will most likely need to have a website that has the cutting edge features. Instant messaging, email, and document cloud storage are basic features that should be mandatory. Finding ways to implement these into the website efficiently is going to be a bigger challenge. In addition, there needs to be benchmarks with respect to new features introduced, because the school wants to be on the cutting edge. In a world where physicians can "see" remote customers via video, and where there are simulations for surgical procedures, it is not too much to ask that the coursework portion of the site be high tech. The drive for high levels of innovation must be balanced against the need for efficiency, not just to reduce stress on the servers but also to accommodate for the fact that not all of our customers have cutting edge computers. In addition, the school's site should have mobile capabilities. It may not be possible to perform all coursework on mobile, but there should be some key components available via mobile app, including signing up for the school, performing some library functions, and checking course announcements and message boards. Thus, the development of the mobile app and the number of downloads will be important benchmarks in terms of features.

e-Marketing Advantages

The main advantage in e-marketing comes in the data gathering process. Selling online is something everybody does, including all direct competitors in the online education space. We look at a firm like Amazon as a benchmark. Amazon is less concerned with the surface-level workings of the website, but instead is focused on the company's ability to gather and store information about the customer, and then to find ways to capitalize on that information. For CyberHealth, the key is to learn as much about our customers as possible, so that we can make better strategies for CyberHealth. In addition, these strategies will be translated to the offline space. The online business will help us to learn about the education market in general.

An organization can never know too much about its customers, and that is one of the main competitive advantages that Med Ed can derive from owning CyberHealth. The ability to gather information about customers and even non-customer prospects is far greater through the use of online tools than is possible through conventional means. By harnessing this power, Med Ed can gain advantage over other offline schools, though arguably it will not be able to gain advantage from this technology against other online schools, who would have access to the same information should they choose to utilize the same technologies.

Summary Statement

The e-business model can help to perform some of the basic marketing functions. The first thing we are going to dispense with is the idea that "click-to-order" is even relevant to the discussion. Real money is made doing things other people are not doing, so basic functionality will be assumed. The key is to be able to better target our market, or more specifically to understand how to appeal to our target market and then to do that. We are focused on health education -- nursing, pharmacy, health care leadership, health information systems and those sorts of studies. We need to use the website to gather information about who our customers are and what appeals to them. Thus, we must gather more information than can be obtained through Google Analytics. The key here is to focus on customer relationship management (CRM), as this is how we can generate return traffic and how we can learn more about the browsing habits, purchasing habits and studying habits of our clientele (Kim, Suh & Hwang, 2003).

Works Cited:

Kim, J., Suh, E. & Hwang, H. (2003). A model for evaluating the effectiveness of CRM using the balanced scorecard. Journal of Interactive Marketing. Vol. 17 (2) 5-19.

Kim, S., Shaw, T. & Schneider, H. (2003). Web site design benchmarking within industry groups. Internet Research. Vol. 13 (1) 17-26.